Omeka working with newer versions of Ubuntu, PHP, etc.

• The bad news is I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to test it, so I can’t really tell you whether it works well or not. I get errors when viewing collections and stuff, but that’s probably because there are no collections. It may also be that newer versions of Apache and MySQL don’t have the same local paths that Omeka wants… not sure.
• The other bad news. Documentation is severely out of date for this. The latest Omeka documentation is for Ubuntu 10.04 (a 3.5 year old release)– Current version is 16.04- and PHP 5 (PHP is now on v7). This matters because certain core libraries, paths and syntaxes for apache, PHP, Ubuntu Linux, and mysql have changed drastically over the past 3 years. I am not a webdev, nor am I a dbadmin, so I simply don’t have the knowledge to be able to fix any bugs that exist or come up.

He is very reluctant to use Omeka.org. He thinks it will require many hours of extra IT management.

I just went through this, after upgrading from Ubuntu 15.10 to 16.04 this afternoon.

I had to do the following to get things righted after the upgrade:
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php
sudo apt-get install php7.0-mysql
sudo apt-get install php7.0-xml
sudo service apache2 restart

Also, php config is now /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini, so if you had modified max upload/post sizes in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini, you need to make the same changes in this file.

I have not verified every plugin, but that seems to get most things working as before.